T HE SUBTERRANEAN ABODE of
the demon dwarf Semar lies
in the geographic heart of
Java, on the fulminous,
mountain-ringed Diyeng Pla
teau. Devout Javanese be
lieve this cave is the center of
the world, the most sacred place in creation.
More than once Darmudji, its caretaker,
had accompanied Indonesian President
Suharto into the cave to meditate and pray
or so Darmudji said, as he unlocked the small
iron gate. By candlelight I crawled after him
down into the chill, cramped darkness. Dar
mudji lit a packet of incense and joined his
bony hands above his head. I supposed he
intended to offer a prayer to the mischievous
Semar, most beloved and purely Javanese of
deities. Instead, reflecting the diverse faiths
Her hands speak of modesty, but her
dress and jewelry declare the confidence
of an ethnic Samama girl welcoming vis
itors to a sultan's palace on the island of
Sumbawa. Traditional Indonesian tex
tile and jewelry designs help identify one's
heritage and social status in a nation
of some 300 ethnic groups.
that have washed up on Java's shores over
centuries, the old man invoked the Hindu
deities Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, then Bud
dha, Muhammad, Adam, and Jesus Christ.
Not long after, on northern Sumatra's
swampy coast, I observed another subterra
nean phenomenon. P. T. Arun gas liquefac
tion plant, a multibillion-dollar installation
owned in part by Pertamina, the govern
ment's energy monopoly, was tapping a
deposit of natural gas 10,000 feet below. A
high-pressure mix of methane, ethane, pro
pane, butane, pentane, carbon dioxide, and
nitrogen gushed into a ten-story cooling
tower. I stood on the steel scaffolding of the
tower, one hand pressed against it, eardrums
bursting from the roar. Inside, refrigerants re
duced the temperature of the swirling gases to
minus 260°F. Liquid gas flowed from storage
into thermos-bottle holds of waiting tankers.
"Basically," explained Efren Rocha, P. T.
Arun's technical training coordinator, "it's
the same process as your home refrigerator's,
only colder." And potentially almost unimag
inably more volatile. The plant sits atop an
estimated 14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas,
one of the world's largest fields. As training
adviser Richard Burton put it only half jok
ingly, "One misplaced spark could rearrange
the topography of northern Sumatra."
Two worlds, time apart, coexist in present
day Indonesia. "Indonesian man is not mod
ern man," Dr. Mochtar Kusumaatmadja,
former foreign minister, told me. "He is mar
ginal man: one foot in the present, one in
ancient traditions. But he is changing fast."
AVA AND SUMATRA are but two of the
more than 13,660 wildly beautiful islands
of the Republic of Indonesia, a nation
populated by 180 million people of some
300 ethnic groups speaking 250 different
languages-the fifth most populous
nation in the world, after China, India, the
Soviet Union, and the United States. Indone
sia stretches across 3,200 miles of water,
separating the Indian Ocean from the Pacific.
On a map of the Western Hemisphere, it
would reach from Oregon to Bermuda.
The colonial Dutch exploited Indonesia for
nearly 350 years but never united the islands
under a central administration. Thus, when
Indonesians won independence in December
1949, they inherited no national polity,
little sense of national identity, and few
NationalGeographic,January1989
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